Why No Excuse

No Excuse is a blog focusing on poverty and poverty issues in Hamilton, Ontario. Look here daily for news items, events, resources, and a chance to engage in discussions with others on local poverty issues. No Excuse was originally staff-written when it was launched in 2007 as part of the Hamilton Spectator's Poverty Project, but it is now a community blog written by people who come from all walks of city life, but share a deep concern for poverty issues. See "Who Are We" for more information about our authors.

June 2007

June 25, 2007

Actually, more like birding. Although I've spent many an hour gliding through reeds in a
canoe, it was never about catching fish.I'm off for a couple of weeks vacation - two to be precise - and will be back on the job and posting Monday July 9, so please come back then and we can pick up where we're leaving off.In the meantime though I'd like to thank the people who've taken the time to nominate stupid regulations and practices of our social assistance system - some came in through the comments section of the "Stupid Welfare Trick" post, others as emails and phone calls.When I'm back, I'll post the list so far and see if we can generate some more ideas - I don't think we've really got our top ten list just yet. I'm especially interested in hearing about the frustrations anyone working inside the system feels - the kind of fixable problems that are obvious from the inside. Annonymous contributions are welcome (leave a voice message or email) as I'll be verifying everything myself before printing anything.Enjoy the next two weeks - I know I will, even if I don't see a single fish.Bill Dunphy

June 22, 2007

I've never met anyone who thought they earned too much money. I've come across a few who feel they have too much and were doing something about it, but nobody who truly believed their income was too high. The truth is we tend to get used to what we have, at some level or another, and grow to think of it as the norm. And in a free(ish) market, consumer society where we are bombarded by messages and images urging ever greater consumption on us, it's almost impossible not to feel as though you're short of the things you want - no, need.So it's no wonder that many of us lose track of really just how well off we are.Happily the good folks over at Growing Gap.ca have put together a simple little calculator (with a easy to read graphic interface) that takes care of that. Move the slider to your approximate annual income, select the number of people in your family and: Voila you find out just where your income puts you relative to the rest of Canada.It's not perfect, but it does offer you a chance to gain a bit of perspective.Police officers, for example, come pretty close to defining "middle class" — a senior constable whose the sole source of income in a 3 person family falls dead on the 50 percentile, i.e. half of the Canadian families have more income, half have less.The mayor's salary (and his two children) put him in the 76th percentile, providing he's the sole source of family income.Senior reporters here at the Spec, with a family the same size as the mayor's fall in the 29th percentile.If you're at the poverty line with a four person family, the calculator puts you at the 5th percentile.And if you're depending on Ontario Works to support a four person family fully 97 percent of the family's in Canada have higher family incomes.

Are back channel foods - i.e. the cheap stuff in the dollar stores that now populate low income neighbourhoods after the supermarkets moved out - safe? Or are manufacturers muddying the waters by mixing their brand policing with public health issues? I don't have a clue, but I know this is an issue that bears watching...

No, you're not dreaming. That's the prediction of the OECD (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) which yesterday reported that they expect our "jobless rate" to fall to 6 per cent next year, while wages are expected to outpace inflation by 2 per cent. (That should mean wage hikes in the 4 per cent range, on average?! I think most of us are about to get a bitter economics lesson on the meaning of "average")

June 20, 2007

I'll be speaking on a panel at a day long conference hosted by the Low Income Energy Network here in
Hamilton today
and while I won't be covering the actual event I hope to come back to the issue soon.Rising energy prices are doing a lot more than nudging the middle class towards energy efficient cars and appliances - they're wreaking havoc on the financial lives of many low-income Canadians, especially those who are living outside of the umbrella of subsidized housing.The Low Income Energy Network describes their mission thusly, LIEN:

aims to ensure universal access to adequate, affordable energy
as a basic necessity, while minimizing the impacts on health and on the
local and global environment of meeting the essential energy and
conservation needs of all Ontarians.

promotes programs and
policies which tackle the problems of energy poverty and homelessness,
reduce Ontario's contribution to smog and climate change, and promote a
healthy economy through the more efficient use of energy, a transition
to renewable sources of energy, education, and consumer protection.

They've been fighting to get the Ontario Energy Board to recognize the need to protect the poor from high energy prices (which are government regulated in one form or another), and mostly they've been failing - although the battle has moved into the courts.The conference is underway as I write, on the second floor of the old family court building ( at Main and John,, the McMaster downtown campus). You can find details of the days events here.Bill Dunphy(Photo from Adam Hally's Flickr photostream)

June 19, 2007

Got back a little while ago from the graduation ceremony for the Notre Dame House School, an alternative school that operates out of the youth shelter and fits under the wing of the St. Charles Adult Education Centres of the Hamilton Wentworth Catholic School Board.Held in the cramped confines of the shelter's dining room, the event was like graduation ceremonies everywhere — if everyone else's grad ceremonies were carries out in small, sweltering rooms with little air and even less room to stand.The movie player balked and the VCR stubbornly refused to be recognized by the television and we all got slowly soaked to the skin as a steady stream of students trooped up to the front of the room to recieve certificates and - in four cases - diplomas. High School Diplomas from students whose peer group probably has as much experience smoking crack as cracking books. Spec photographer Ron Albertson, a straight-talking type who doesn't let his big heart blur his vision much, spent an hour and a half with these grads and came away remarking on how they were a mix of "pretty hard girls and just plain nice kids." Often wrapped in the same package. You'll meet one of those 'kids' — Lyndsay MacDonald — in tomorrow's paper, learn of her descent onto the streets and her hard climb up, but after watching the students today I'm pretty sure I could of picked any of the four graduates and found an equally compelling, inspiring story.Begun in 2001, the school has two teachers, an education assistant, and about 30 students, and a hell of a lot to feel good about. Just thought you'd like to know - it's not all heartless bureaucracies and venal policy makers. Sometimes it's about people, in all their glorious imperfection, triumphing. Not forever, maybe not even in the long run. But now. And sometimes that's enough.As Lyndsay told me "I break everything up into little sections and get 'em done one at a time."Bill Dunphy(Slightly blurry photo of the grads is from my cell phone camera, not Albertson's sharp shooting which you can see in tomorrow's paper)

June 18, 2007

I dropped in at the Masonic hall Thursday afternoon, to take in the Know Your Benefits forum sponsored by the OW/ODSP Advisory Committee. There were about 70 people there, probably about half of whom worked for on or other of the 11 groups who'd set up information tables around the hall. After an hour or so of presentations, the mikes were opened up to questions from the floor - and that's wehn it struck me.Listening to a group of well-meaning civil servants try, and completely fail, to explain away some of the larger idiocies of the welfare bureaucracies they serve when it struck me.How can our governments get away with such foolishness as clawing back a student's summer earnings if their parent happens to be on disability? Or refusing to allow caseworkers to give out their email addresses to clients? Or paying for emergency dental work for low-income folks, but not pay for the routine maintenance that will keep their teeth from deteriorating to the danger point? Or. Or. Or.How can they get away with it?Well, obviously because they don't believe anyone really cares.Or maybe it's because nobody really knows - except the poor souls trapped in the soul-less grind of those mindless regulations. If only there was some way, I thought, of telling people about these stupid bits of our welfare laws.Like I say, then it struck me. Hey! I work for a big city paper, maybe I can do something about it.So, announcing the first Top Ten Stupid Welfare Tricks (we'll work on the name) - a series of short snappy pieces designed to embarrass our lawmakers into action during this, an election year.We'll run the series in the paper and then give it a permanent home on the web, but first I need nominations from you - the people who know this system inside and out because either you administer it, depend on it or try and help people navigate its shoals. Whichever side of the desk you sit on I'm sure you can put your finger on some truly inane, counter-productive, regulation or rule, something that cries out for fixing.Just click on the comment link below and give me your nomination - I'll take it from there.If you want to submit them anonymously that's fine. You can email me (bdunphy-at -thespec.com) from a web account, leave me a voice mail (at 905.526-3262), fax me your nomination at 905.526-1395, or cut out letters from a magazine, stick 'em on piece of notepaper and slip it under the Spectator doors in the dead of night. It's the stupid idea, not the author that counts.Bill Dunphyphoto from Adam Jakubiak's Flickr photostream

June 14, 2007

I was going to post about the Conference Board of Canada's first annual "report card on Canada" and maybe offer readers a link to the report or perhaps even host the thing here at No Excuse.You've doubtless seen or heard coverage of the report over the past day or two, you know, the report that warned that Canadians were "shockingly mediocre" and deserved a 'D' for innovation (or more accurately failing to innovate). The report compares Canada with some 14 other developed countries, using a swath of variables covering things like education and R&D spending, productivity, government regulation etc."The
results were very uneven and very disappointing, in some cases,
shockingly disappointing," said Anne Golden, CEO of the Conference
Board. "You can trace our poor performance to a failure to innovate in
the broadest sense." (From the Toronto Star coverage of the report. You can read other coverage, here.)The conference board describes itself as "A not-for-profit Canadian organization that takes a business-like approach to its operations."Predictably, the report led the nightly news and landed on more than one front page. Our own Graeme MacKay lampooned them (and all of us too, I guess) in his editorial cartoon in today's Spec. His web site is worth a visit, if you enjoy editorial cartooning.The report praised Canada for tackling seniors poverty, but generally seemed to seriously downplay the social side of the economic policies they were attacking as mediocre. (An example? Decrying efforts to keep "small" mills alive in single-employer towns when larger consolidated plants are more efficient. "We need to think more innovatively" the report states.) Hmm. Like I said I was going to post about all this. But then I went to the Conference Board's website and tried to download a copy of the report to read for myself and perhaps link to. A "free" sign-in was required. Unfortunately for an organization that's concerned about productivity and innovation, their approach to web distribution reminds me of trying to borrow a book from a crabby, small-town, power-mad librarian. Their "free sign in" requires you to work your way through 5 screens and one email confirmation. You have to fill out about 20 fields, providing them with such useful, vital information as ...

Your middle name

Your learning style (?!)

Your work email

Your job function.

(I guess unemployed people aren't allowed to view the report)Hell, now that I think about it, they've got me mad. I'm going to finish the registration, filling in nonsense, get the report and post it for you here.And you won't have to tell me a thing about yourself.Grab the report "How Canada Performs: A report card on Canada" here (2 MB .pdf file)

Update: I got an email Friday from Beth Laporte, supervisor of the Conference Board of Canada's Information Resource Centre, telling me to take the report off the site:

"The report is accessible to the general public, however, copyright for the material prohibits the redistribution of the report without our consent"

And presumably I won't be getting that. Sorry. I guess if you want to read the actual report you'll have to buy it from the Conference Board, paying with information as ludicrous and time wasting as your middle name. I don't get the reasoning, and can't imagine why they'd object to someone helping bring more eyeballs to their ideas, but that's their right. So now it's only available if you register. And since you can only register if you're employed — or lie repeatedly during the registration — I guess the report is not really intended for the 20 per cent of Hamiltonians who live below the poverty line.Mediocre indeed.

June 13, 2007

CityHousing Hamilton - the body responsible for the city's stock of social housing - has more than a few things to be proud of. They're actually building some new units — an all too rare event in the public housing field for the past decade or so — and they've adopted policies aimed at minimizing evictions. They're also partnering with outside groups in some innovative ways, i.e. HomeStart, which will help a small number of social housing tenants "graduate" to home ownership.CityHousing Hamilton was at last week's Affordable Housing Flagship conference, talking about their plans and showcasing some of their projects, like HomeStart (which I wrote about last week.) But there is one piece of CityHousing Hamilton's plans that sticks out like a butcher at a vegetarian meeting — in order to get people out of public housing they're selling off some of the best housing stock they own.Homestart helps tenants save for a down payment on a house, providing up to $4,500 in funds to match their own savings over a three year period.Qualifying tenants are also given training in home maintenance, managing finances and walked through the whole process of buying a house. It's a smart, simple plan that relies on a small amount of money and a hefty amount of help from the community.It's a great program. Tenants get to build up a significant asset — a house — with all the positive ramifications that can have. And moving them out of CityHousing frees up another spot on the city's rent geared-to-income roster, something nearly 8,200 people are waiting for.But of the 22 tenants they've enrolled in the program so far, eight, more than a third, will be buying their own homes, i.e. they'll be buying CityHousing Hamilton houses.This seems like lunacy to me.

June 12, 2007

I'm back. Before we get too far away from it, I'd like to share a couple more items from the Affordable Housing Flagship event last week.
Certainly the highlight presentation was a talk by a pair of Torontonians, Graham Watts and Karen Kindness, from Woodgreen Community Services. They were brought to Hamilton to tell us about Homeward Bound, a newish, wrap-around type program whose goal is deceptively simple: "help women and children who have experienced homelessness acheive economic self-sufficiency."Homeward Bound does this, Graham explained, by offering

Housing support (actually a place to live in purpose-built housing)

Career development

On-site childcare (and After Four programs)

One-on-one counselling

Chance for a job at the end of the programme.

It appears to be an ambitious, tightly targeted program that, while it isn't for everyone, offers real hope to at least a minority of homeless women.